The Notebook. José Saramago

      And now the upshot of all this is finally with us. It goes by the title Blindness, which it is hoped will make it easier for people on the international circuit to connect it with the book. I saw no reason to dispute this decision. Today in Lisbon this Blindness of mine was presented in images and sounds. The audience was made up of a good number of journalists who I hope will be able to give a good account of it. The preview will be tomorrow. When we were talking about these episodes of recent history, at one point Pilar—the most practical and objective of all the individuals I know—came out with an idea: “As I understand it, the book anticipated the effects of the crisis we are suffering today. Those people desperately running down Wall Street, from bank to bank, before the money runs out are no different from the ones who move, blind, directionless, through the novel and now the film. The difference is that they don’t have a doctor’s wife guiding and protecting them.” Come to think of it, this Andalusian woman may be right.

       October 29: A New Capitalism?

       A few days ago, a number of us from different countries and different political positions signed the text that I am reproducing below. It is a wakeup call, a protest, and an expression of the alarm we feel faced with the crisis and the possible solutions being put forward. We cannot be complicit.

      A NEW CAPITALISM?

       The time has come for change on a collective and individual scale. The time has come for justice.

      The financial crisis is again destroying our economies, hitting our lives hard. This past decade its disruptions have been increasingly frequent and dramatic. East Asia, Argentina, Turkey, Brazil, Russia, the massacre of the New Economics, prove that these are not just random accidents happening on the surface of economic life but are inscribed in the very heart of the system.

      These ruptures that have ended up producing a disastrous contraction of contemporary economic life, and are used to justify unemployment and the spread of inequality, and mark the shattering of financial capitalism and the definitive ankylosis of the global economic order in which we live. So it is necessary to transform it radically.

      In his discussion with President Bush, Durão Barroso, president of the European Union, stated that the current crisis should lead to “a new global economic order,” a solution that is acceptable as long as this new order is guided by the democratic principles—which should never be abandoned—of justice, liberty, equality and solidarity.

      The laws of the market led to a state of chaos that brought a rescue of thousands of millions of dollars—to the culprits, not the victims. In other words, “rescue” meant “privatize the profits, nationalize the losses.” This is a unique opportunity to redefine the global economic system in favor of social justice. There was no money to fund the fight against AIDS, nor to support feeding the world. . . and finally, in a real financial whirlwind, it turns out that there were enough funds to save from ruin those very same people who, by overly favoring dotcom and property bubbles, have destroyed the world economic edifice of “globalization.”

      This is why it is completely wrong for President Sarkozy to speak of the realization of so many efforts under the aegis of the interested parties aiming at “a new capitalism”! And for President Bush, as one might have expected, to have agreed that “the freedom of the market” should be safeguarded (without getting rid of farm subsidies!). . .

      No: now it is we, the citizens, who should be rescued, and we should with speed and courage favor the transition from an economy of war to an economy of global development, in which the collective embarrassment of three thousand million dollars a day being invested in arms while more than sixty thousand people are dying of starvation would be overcome. An economy of development that would eliminate the abusive exploitation of the natural resources currently taking place (oil, gas, minerals, coal) and apply norms under the supervision of a reconstituted United Nations—including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank “for reconstruction and development,” and the World Trade Organization, which should not be a private club for nations but a U.N.O. institution—using whatever personal, human and technical means were necessary to exercise its judicial and ethical authority effectively.

      Investment in renewable energy, food production (agriculture and aquiculture), the obtaining and distribution of water, and in health, education, housing. . . so that the “new economic order” might at last be democratic and beneficial to individuals. The errors of globalization and of the market economy must stop! Civil society will no longer remain a resigned spectator, and if necessary will apply all the power of the citizenry together with every modern means of communication it now has at its fingertips.

      A new capitalism? No!

      The time has come for change on a collective and individual scale. The time has come for justice.

      Federico Mayor Zaragoza

      Francisco Altemir

      José Saramago

      Roberto Savio

      Mário Soares

      José Vidal Beneyto

       October 30: The Question

      “And I would ask the political economists, the moralists, if they have already calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to wretchedness, to overwork, to demoralization, to infantilization, to despicable ignorance, to insurmountable misfortune, to utter penury, in order to produce one rich person?”

      Almeid

      1 Translators’ note: The Portuguese word for “person” is “pessoa.”

      2 Published in the UK in a translation by Margaret Jull Costa, under the title Blindness.

       November 2008

       November 3: Falsehood, Truth

      On the eve of the presidential elections in the United States, this little observation is not, I think, out of place. Some time back a Portuguese politician, then in government, said to anyone prepared to listen that politics is primarily the art of not telling the truth. The worst thing was that after he said it there wasn’t, as far as I know, a single politician, left or right, who corrected him, saying absolutely not, truth should be the first and last aim of politics, for the simple reason that this is the only way that both can be saved—truth saved by politics, and politics saved by truth.